digging in mud

...
It's not just soft, it's smooth and plastic, though plastic would not describe mud well in those days. Smooth if there are no rocks or splinters in the aggregate.
Mud soothes.

Some wrapped it on a bee sting.
That or damp bicarbonate of soda.
To draw out the poison.
Both were muddy enough to pinch onto that stick of a finger, but not too wet or too dry, because the patch would slip and drip off or crumble to no use.

The bee was attending to pollen when I squashed it and how my foot swelled and my hand that other time. Swollen to such a concern that I would have taken my daughter to the ER. The reaction suggested other things. Breathing. But breath came in and out steadily while I couldn't sleep. Scared of that thing that was so swollen, my foot or hand or finger.

Stick it in the sink in cold water in the night, let it run, summer moon lighting the open window. Jump up and down so as not to scratch, for the itch was powerful enough to keep you awake, but quietly, jump quietly. The family is sleeping on beds and couches out where we are altogether in the guest house at my grandmother's. And my grandfather's, but he was passive, asleep in the red leather chair down the hill, while we tried to make money renting our house. Those people smashed my red china doll and let the pool go.

At school soak a mud colored paper towel, fibers stretching and breaking down to a pulp, stick it like a bandaid clinging to my not so thin finger. And wish you were home in that heat, not in your desk sweltering, a faint threatening, dabbing the wet mushy paper on your forehead, over and over, wetting it again.

Silly girl, bee stings, breathing, heat exhaustion, stop this silliness.

This is nothing next to a father going insane and a mother sloppy drunk, whispering something to other men, not my father, with a door locked to make it suspicious, to survive, to keep going for the girl who's hand itched so powerfully. terribly all night long in the other room.


...